


Teeth and eyes are shining

by jadelennox



Category: Portero Universe - Dia Reeves
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Canon Disabled Character, Disability, Female Character of Color, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 09:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/976959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadelennox/pseuds/jadelennox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She tapped the two remaining fingers on her right hand, until neither Momoko nor Vic could look away, until she was positive they were looking at the mottled scar that covered the area where she'd once had two fingers and a thumb: lumps of tissue in red and black and rotten salmon and dirty nicotine, ugly and raw against her knuckles. "I am not <em>prey</em>," she hissed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teeth and eyes are shining

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelette/gifts).



> See end notes for more warnings.
> 
> Thanks to Katta for the speedy beta and Cnoocy for suggesting I ask the Monster Manual for advice.

The school bell rang for the end of the day, and everyone in Ms. Gilbert's seventh grade tossed their books in backpacks and ran from the room so fast you'd think cacklers were after them. Everyone, that is, except for Luda and Momoko. Momoko was waiting for Luda, who had to save all her files on the ancient loaner laptop, shut it down, and bring it to the office so the learning specialist could print out her notes. There was no point in rushing; it would be at least 20 minutes before she could leave, even if the printer was free, and the paper didn't jam, and Mr. Fisher wasn't busy and could start the printing right away.

Luda was glad Momoko was willing to wait for her. Mostly.

It didn't take that long to shut everything down, even working only with her left hand. She wouldn't let Momoko help, but it's not like it was that hard to shove a laptop and a battered copy of _Dicey's Song_ into her backpack. Momoko'd put her binder and book away so slowly that she was ready to go at the same time as Luda. She did it quietly, as if it were nothing odd, as if she always took three times as long as everyone else to load her bag. Sometimes she slept over and was just the same in Luda's house, waking up half an hour earlier in the morning just like Luda did now, as if it were normal to take twice as long getting showered and dressed. Luda noticed she was starting to suck her teeth and stopped, whisper-quick, before Momoko could notice.

"This book makes no sense," Luda said, as they walked down the hall. They'd been reading _Dicey's Song_ for almost a month now and she didn't get it at all. "The little kids keep biking off into the woods alone. Nobody stops them. And nothing gets them. They ain't even scared!"

"They're in Maryland," said Momoko, sensibly. She was good at being sensible. "Things are probably different in Maryland."

"No doors," Luda agreed.

"No doors anywhere but here," Momoko said, smugly. Luda huffed in agreement. It was hard not to be self-satisfied about the rest of the world when you were a Porterene.

Mr. Fisher wasn't busy, and the paper didn't jam, but he did want to ask her how her occupational therapy was going. She wasn't going to tell him the truth: that learning to write with her left hand made her brain so exhausted that it felt like there was some muscle in her head and she'd run a marathon using only that muscle. Mostly she didn't do her exercises at all, but she wasn't going to tell Mr. Fisher, who'd get all _earnest_ and _helpful_. Instead, she just said "fine," and "good," to all of his questions Momoko helped out, by glancing at her watch after a couple of minutes and saying, "Luda, my sister's going to be ticked if she comes to pick us up and we aren't there yet."

They were walking home, and without Momoko's sister, but Mr. Fisher didn't know that.

Vic -- who had a different homeroom, so got out before them -- was waiting for them outside, leaning against the wall near the basketball nets. There were still teachers waiting for the stragglers to head home, so it was pretty safe to wait, but even so it seemed nuts for him to be wearing an oversize Princess Bubblegum T-shirt. It was as if he'd decided that as long as he was getting beaten up on someone else's behalf anyway, he might as well go for broke. He'd hit his growth spurt this year, and as he leaned there tall and awkward, his hair in twists and the writing on his black tee picked out in an obnoxious cotton candy pink, Luda was torn between irritation and affection.

Vic pushed himself off the wall when he saw them. "Izzy and Logan and the rest of them went upsquare, I think. Toward Logan's house."

That could be good news. In theory, that meant they might be avoidable. Heck, they might even have actually just gone to Logan's house to play games on his massive flatscreen TV. "Think it's a fake-out?" asked Luda.

"We're safer if we assume it's a feint," Momoko said. She was, after all, the sensible one. Also she was the one who knew words like _feint_. One day Momoko would probably get skipped up a grade, but Luda tried not to be frightened of things until they were right in front of her face. It was usually a good survival strategy in Portero.

Usually.

"Okay, so," said Vic, and then he paused, absentmindedly poking at the yellowing bruise around his eye.

Momoko picked up a stick and sketched a rough map of downtown in the weedy dirt that never quite succeeded at being a flower bed. "Yesterday they got us on Taylor, and last Wednesday they ambushed us downsquare near Luda's."

"Nothing _works_ ," said Vic, glaring at the map like it was Portero's fault. All they have to do is split up, be ready at Taylor and downsquare by the library, and they've basically blocked pretty much every route we can use to get home."

Momoko glared at the map, too, as if staring at it for long enough would create a protected road straight from school to Luda's, or Vic's, or even her house. Luda knew it was worse for Momoko. When Vic and Luda got beaten up, the beating was where it stopped: black eyes, bruised ribs, humiliation. But when Momoko went home with visible injuries, she had to put up with her Mortmaine sister tearing her a new one for not being able to protect herself. Or worse, for allying herself to pathetic victims like Luda or Vic. Taking care of those who can't protect themselves was not the Mortmaine way.

"This is stupid," Luda said, surprising herself. "We're thinking like prey, not like Porterenes."

"What do you suggest?" snapped Momoko, who probably got plenty of that Mortmaine talk at home. "Charging into ambush like we're the predators? All the attitude in the world won't change the fact that there are seven of them and Izzy takes karate classes."

No, not charging into ambush. Luda looked at the cross marking St. Mike's on the map and shook her head, trying to track down a stray thought. Did she really want to ...? _Yes._ She grabbed the stick from Momoko and drew where there _was_ a straight road from school to her neighborhood, downsquare past St. Mike's. "We go through the dark park."

* * *

After that, Luda just stood back, leaning against the school. She let Momoko and Vic do all the arguing on their own, back and forth, cutting each other off as they yelled.

"That's freaking crazy --"

"And after your hand --"

"Do you think you're an _initiate_ or something?"

"You gone lose the rest of your fingers -- "

"You're that much of a hardass, huh? Planning on dressing in green from now on?"

"We're not so scared of a stupid pack of bullies that we want to commit suicide-by-toadies --"

When they ran out of steam, Luda pushed herself off the school wall, crossing her arms, resting her right hand against her left bicep. "You done?" 

"Lu," Vic began, then trailed off. He knew that look on her face.

She tapped the two remaining fingers on her right hand, until neither Momoko nor Vic could look away, until she was positive they were looking at the mottled scar that covered the area where she'd once had two fingers and a thumb: lumps of tissue in red and black and rotten salmon and dirty nicotine, ugly and raw against her knuckles. "I am not _prey_ ," she hissed. "Ever since that cackler bit me everyone's treating me like some damn transy who can't take care of herself. And not just Izzy and Logan and their pack of morons, either." She thrust out her hands, pointing a left-handed finger gun at her friends, and holding out her mutilated right fist as emphasis. "Y'all keep acting like I'm just round the corner from a suicide door."

Momoko took a step forward. "There's a difference between _not being a victim_ and _downright stupid_. And walking through the dark park -- with no preparation, no weapons, no Mortmaine -- is downright stupid."

"If we make it, it'll get your sister off your back, though, won't it?" 

And that was that. Even Vic stopped arguing at that point. He knew a lost cause when he was stuck right in the middle of it, marching off to certain maiming.

Fifteen minutes in, the dark park didn't look so impressive. It was just like any other bit of mostly-piney forest around Portero: stands of black hickory and sassafras; pigweed, sundew, butterwort, and false garlic spilled, verdant, over their feet; bindweed entangled everything. Pitcher plants grew in sunny spots with the trees thinned out, happily digesting flies, beetles, and in the case of one oversized plant, a half-dissolved chipmunk. 

"Who'd've thought the dark park would be so boring?" Vic poked at a snake half-hidden under a sprawling staggerbush.

"Don't jinx us, idiot," said Luda. "And stop poking snakes." 

"Aww, this l'il guy?" Vic reached down to grab it. "It's just a grass snake, jeeze."

"Little?" Momoko crossed her arms. "I still don't see its head."

"...Or the other end of its tail," said Luda. "Vic, I don't think -- "

Vic kept pulling. "Whoa, guys, look at this! Have you ever seen a grass snake this long?" By this point he was two feet away from the staggerbush, pulling a looped reptile body, and neither end was yet visible.

Momoko and Luda shared a look. "No," said Momoko. She grabbed the back of Vic's T-shirt and tried to yank him backwards. "So let go of it."

Vic looked nervously down at the 6 feet of snake body now trailing from his hands. He knelt to put the snake on the ground -- and as he did, several more feet of reptile whipped out of the shrubbery. The loop in Vic's hands tightened, wrapped once, twice, three times around his wrists. The now visible head wriggled lightning fast across the dusty path, knocking Luda's feet out from under her. She came down hard on her left knee and yelped, then cried out again when Momoko tumbled to the ground as well, her elbow knocking against Luda's cheek. Momoko was still holding on to Vic's collar and he stumbled back as well. When Luda could finally catch her breath -- well, she couldn't really catch her breath. Because the skinny but _how freaking long?_ snake was wrapped around the three of them, squeezing. Luda took tiny sips of air, straining, her chest burning, pressed so tightly against her friends she could feel the imprint of Momoko's patterned dress rubbing what felt like permanent grooves into her own flesh. Dark sparks appeared around the edges of her vision, like they sometimes did when she pressed against her eyelids at night. She saw flashes of purple out of the corner of her eye. Purple?

And then the snake was yanked away so fast it felt like rope burn against her midriff. For several long seconds, Luda didn't even look up to see what bigger nasty was eating the snake. She sprawled, shaking, in the dirt and clover, leaning against Vic and Momoko, inhaling huge, gasping breaths.

"Who's the transy?" Vic finally asked, his voice hoarse. Luda looked up to see a girl dressed in outsider-bright colors chopping at the seemingly-endless constrictor with an axe. "And how did she even do that?"

Momoko smacked his arm, hard. "That's Hanna, Wyatt Ortiga's girlfriend. She's practically Mortmaine."

Vic rubbed his arm, then tugged at his shirt, shredded where the snake had whipped across his chest. "Then why the purple?"

The girl in purple -- Hanna, Luda guessed -- looked up from the constrictor she was eviscerating, blood splattered across her cheek. "Because purple's my poppa's favorite color."

"And because she _can_ ," hissed Momoko. "Hanna can draw attention of creepy-crawlies if she wants. She went toe-to-toe with the Mayor and won."

Well, _shit_.

"Sorry about Vic, ma'am," said Luda. "He just isn't always a thinker." Even if Hanna hadn't just saved them from the snake, if a girl could win a scrap with the Mayor, she deserved a little extra politeness.

"No problem," said Hanna, putting down the pieces of reptile and brushing herself off. Or trying to, anyway. Mostly she just smeared the snake guts around to less-coated parts of her. She looked at her gore-smeared arms in disgust. "Could one of you kids look in my bag? There should be a hanky and a clean dress."

The hanky, when Luda found it, was edged all around with delicate lace like the kind on her mother's antique tablecloth. "You're not gone wipe the blood off with this pretty thing, are you?" She stared at the lavender scrap in dismay.

"Huh." Hanna tilted her head. "Maybe yank off the lace edging, first. The rest of it was quick enough, but bobbin lace is a bitch and a half to make. Come on, now."

"Hurry," Momoko said. "We should move away from the blood and corpse before other things come."

"True." Hanna, laughed, but sounded pissed off, not amused. "Those hardheads do like fresh corpses."

Luda found a pen in her pocket and pried it between the seams of lace and the cotton, peeling off the delicate edging as quickly as she could, trying -- mostly unsuccessfully -- to keep it from unraveling. She tossed the hanky to Hanna, who wiped her face with it, then pulled her dark purple jumper over her head. Momoko threw a hand over Vic's eyes.

"Aw," he said, but he didn't try to wriggle away. Luda guessed he probably would have closed his eyes on his own if Momoko hadn't covered them.

Hanna laughed again, and this time she did sound amused. "Aren't you kids sweet," she said. Her voice was muffled as she wiped her face and arms with the now-ruined jumper. "Hand me the clean stuff." Luda passed over the bag, which proved to contain a clean sundress (purple, of course) and lavender underthings. 

"You had a whole suit of clothes in there," Momoko said, her tone the one she used when she was trying not to sound impressed. Her hand was still over Vic's eyes.

"I've learned to be prepared round here. Especially in the dark park. Here, do me up." She turned her back to Luda, who tightened the complicated laces at Hanna's waist.

"What are you doing alone in the dark park?" asked Luda, as she tied a neat bow. "Even the Mortmaine don't come in here alone."

"She ain't alone," said a voice from the trees, and Luda jumped. Momoko let out a little squeak of surprise. 

Two girls dropped down from a loblolly. The taller girl seemed almost inhumanly skinny in tight leggings and a tee, a pixie cut framing a jutting chin. She flipped a switch blade open and shut, open and shut, so the blade caught the mottled light through the trees in hypnotic, irregular flashes. The shorter girl, hair in a cloud around her face, carried some kind of weird, industrial-steampunk looking _thing_.

Vic twisted free of Momoko's grasp, his eyes wide. "You're the Cordelle sisters."

"Got it in one, kid. Kit Cordelle, at your service," said the taller girl. The other girl scowled. "And my sociable sister, Fancy."

"I was friends with Selenicera," said Vic. "It's an honor. I mean. Wow."

Luda remembered Selenicera, remembered her getting pale and greenish and big-eyed at school before her older sister pulled her out. She remembered the big sister vanishing, and some kids getting a postcard from Selenicera in San Antonio, where she was staying with an aunt who'd left Portero for college and never come back. Kit and Fancy Cordelle were _heroes_. Luda cringed at needing to get rescued like a dumb transy in front of Wyatt Ortiga's girlfriend and two genuine Portero superstars.

Momoko looked first at Hanna in her purple sundress, then back at the Cordelles. "What are y'all doing in the dark park? You ain't here to rescue _us_." 

"Nah," said Kit. "Hanna here has a monster she needs a little help with, is all."

Hanna shrugged. "A human monster, anyway. The kind the Mortmaine don't bother with. You know how little kids have been going missing these last couple months?"

Luda nodded. Her mom was friends with Adi's mom, and they'd brought over pancakes and sat with her and held her hand when they found the body.

"Hanna found the guy responsible, is all," Kit said.

"He's been living in the dark park," Hanna explained. "He's got a shack."

Momoko looked disbelieving. "You can live here? Don't all the creatures eat you?"

"I think he's got some kind of shield built around, like a fence," Hanna explained. "The creatures can't get through it."

Fancy Cordelle laughed, scary sweet. "It won't keep _me_ out."

Kit put her arm around her sister and squeezed, laughing when Fancy stiffened and tried to pull away. "We gone do for that fucker like he did for those kids."

"Want to come with, guys?" asked Hanna. "Never to young to learn. Not around Portero."

"And don't say 'fucker,'" said Fancy.

* * *

Later, Luda could never exactly remember the grotesque garden Fancy Cordelle took them to with her portable door-gadget-thingamajig. There was a house, she remembered that much, with grey, leathery walls that pulsed _baDUM baDUM baDUM_ like a hearbeat. She remembered how the house somehow up and swallowed the creepy old white man Hanna said was the killer. She'd thought it would be like a horror movie: maybe a swirling dark hole and the killer getting dragged backward, screaming, all over in 30 seconds. But it last for a really, really, long time. "I'm real detail oriented," Fancy'd said, while they watched the house nibble on the killer's toenails, then his toes, then his feet, then his ankles. There wasn't just blood, but crunched pieces of bone and little flecks Kit said were tendon. The killer kept screaming and moaning and crying, but Fancy waved her hand (" _I hate all the whining and fuss_ ") and his cries went totally silent.

A group of waiters in tuxedos came up with trays of little pastries and cups of hot chocolate. Luda, acid rising in her throat, turned them down. Vic, his eyes huge, said no as well.

Momoko had firsts and then seconds. Luda guessed Momoko might be able to impress her Mortmaine sister, after all.

Near the end, Fancy held up her hand. "Stop!" she called to the house, and the crunching paused, the leathery house somehow looking expectant. Fancy pointed to the killer's arms, lying half devoured on the ground. "You want those?" she asked Luda.

"What would the kid want the nasty arms for, Fancy?" Kit was eating a tiny eclair and canoodling with some guy at the edge of Fancy's weird torture circle.

"Just the fingers, jeeze." Fancy made eye contact with Luda for the first time. "You want the fingers?"

"Um." Luda got the impression Fancy was being _nice_. Or thought she was. "No thanks."

Fancy shrugged. "Yeah, then I guess you'd have nasty old diddly murder fingers. I can grow you some fresh ones if you want, though. Not from this guy," she said, gesturing at the puddle of gore that used to be a murderer. "But off the tree, no murder or nothing." She waved behind them to a tree that, come to think of it, did look to have ears and eyeballs and toes growing among the leaves.

Luda didn't even have to think about it. "Thanks very much, but no," she said. "I mean, I appreciate the offer, but I'm happy."

Momoko scrunched her face. "You sure? I know you hate your occupational therapy." As far as Luda could tell Momoko didn't think there'd be anything weird about getting new fingers grown from a body parts tree. But it wasn't about the ick factor, anyhow.

"Yeah, but I love having an excuse to use the computer as much as I want." She waved her hand. "Who needs ten fingers?"

Hanna smiled, wide and kind of scary. "I like you," she said. "You remind me of me."

It was weird wanting the approval of a girl who wore purple, carried an axe, and was still pretty bloodstained, but Luda couldn't help the way Hanna's words filled her all full of _feelings_. While she tried to make sense of it, the house and the blood puddle and the waiters all faded around them, and they were back in the dark park, in the clearing where the killer lived. 

"Whee!" said Kit. "Now maybe we'll get attacked and I can kill something."

Fancy scowled. "You didn't have to let Hanna kill the snake, if you're that thirsty to get all bloody and allover nasty yourself."

Kit clapped one long arm around Hanna's shoulders. "Sure I did. She needs practice, and she's too damn squeamish."

"Not like Fancy," protested Hanna. "I just don't like ruining my clothes if I don't have to."

"Ooh," said Vic, from around the corner of the shack. "The old guy had dark peach trees!"

Luda and the others went around the corner, following Vic's voice. Out back, behind the shack, was a stand of trees, heavy with lightly furred peaches. They all stood a moment in awed silence.

"Man," said Kit, finally.

"Right?" said Vic. He reached out and reverently placed his hand against one peach.

Momoko finally spoke. "Are they ours?"

"Sure, why not?" said Fancy. "Killer won't be eating them no more."

Kit just grinned at them around a dark peach, juice dribbling down her chin. 

"I've never had a dark peach," said Hanna, hesitant for the first time. "I've only lived here for a couple of years."

Luda smiled shyly at her. "This is gone be real cool, then. Let's go to my house and make juice."

**Author's Note:**

> Mild ableist language, minor reference to potential suicide. Canon levels of gore. Actually, way less than canon levels of gore, let's be honest. Animal harm, also far less than canon but still present.


End file.
